Free Mac apps for making films

Backlot keeps the budget, script breakdown, stripboard, day out of days, call sheets and daily reports in one project file on your own disk, and prints them the way a production office expects to see them.

• Budgets that track the money. Fringes, globals and budget alternatives, plus purchase orders, invoices and petty cash posted against each line, so every account shows committed, spent and variance.
• Breakdowns from your script. Import a Final Draft or Fountain draft. When a revised draft comes in, Backlot shows what changed before it touches anything and marks the pages in the standard revision colors.
• A real stripboard. Drag strips, sort by location or time of day, keep named board alternatives, pin shoot days to a calendar, and get a cast and element day out of days from the same board.
• Call sheets you can send. Issue a call sheet as a PDF, send it by email or text, and see who confirmed. Daily reports, a take log and a one-click production book come from the same project.
• Send it to your crew. Save the whole project as one file and email or AirDrop it. When it comes back, Backlot shows what changed and replaces your copy after backing it up.
• Works with Claude. A built-in MCP server lets Claude and other MCP clients read and edit the same project, with the same validation and undo history as the app.

Optional extras

Dumptruck copies a camera card to your backup drives, reads each copy back off the drive to check it against the card, and writes an HTML and PDF report with ASC MHL manifests. A card shows SAFE TO WIPE only when two separate drives hold verified copies. There is no erase button. Wiping the card is still your call.

This is a beta. SAFE TO WIPE means the job passed Dumptruck's verification when it ran. It can't protect you from a drive that fails later. Keep your usual backup routine alongside it, and read the report before you erase a card.

• Verification that reads the drive. Copies are written past the macOS file cache, so the verify pass reads the data back from the drive itself instead of from memory.
• Cards that keep shooting. Bring back a card that wasn't formatted and Dumptruck copies only the new clips into the same folder, adding a new manifest generation. Changed or reused clip names get a loud warning, never a silent skip.
• Single clips off a drive. Pick the clips you want with Choose Source Files…, or drag them in from Finder, and Dumptruck copies just those, straight from the drive. They never show SAFE TO WIPE, since the rest of the drive wasn't copied.
• Reports for the client. Every offload gets an HTML and PDF report with clip thumbnails and metadata, a JSON receipt, ASC MHL v2.0 and legacy MHL v1.1.
• Camera formats. Dumptruck reads R3D, BRAW and ARRIRAW files for metadata and thumbnails through bundled helpers, which ask you to accept their terms the first time. Copying and verification work either way.

Lacquer takes the ProRes, DNxHR, H.264 or HEVC master you exported and makes a Blu-ray from it, with an on-screen menu if you want one. It writes a BDMV folder, a disc image you can upload to a duplicator, or an M2TS for Toast. It works out the bitrate to fill the disc and warns you before it starts if anything is off.

This is a beta. Menus are checked with libbluray, the library VLC uses to play Blu-ray menus, but players differ. Burn one disc and try it on your own player before sending a run to a duplicator.

• Menus that look like your film. Pick a frame from the film or your poster, choose one of three styles, and name your scenes. The preview shows the menu as a TV will draw it, and you can drive it with the arrow keys. On the disc, Play, scene buttons, subtitles on and off, and Top Menu all work from the remote.
• The right format for your frame rate. Blu-ray has no 1080p at 25 or 29.97, so Lacquer carries those masters as 1080i without dropping a frame, and tells you when a format you picked would.
• Audio the way editors export it. A 5.1 track is used as is. Six separate mono tracks from Resolve or Premiere are combined into 5.1, in either common channel order. Audio is AC-3, which every Blu-ray player decodes.
• Fits the disc. Pick BD-25 or BD-50 and Lacquer sets the video bitrate from the running time. A film that can't fit is caught before encoding, not after.
• Subtitles and chapters. Add an .srt and viewers can turn the subtitles on and off. Chapter stops go every 5 or 10 minutes or wherever you list them, and each one lands on its exact frame.
• HDR and older footage. HDR masters are tonemapped to standard Rec.709, SD footage gets its color converted, and interlaced sources are deinterlaced before scaling.
• A log for every disc. Each job writes a log next to its output with every command it ran, so a problem disc can be traced.

Click an empty paragraph in Final Draft, press Command-Option-D and talk through the scene: where you are, what happens, who says what. Press it again and the scene lands at your cursor as real Final Draft paragraphs, with the scene heading, action, character names, parentheticals and dialogue each in its own element. The speech recognition and the formatting both run on your Mac.

This is a beta. The formatting model gets most takes right, not every one. Read what it pasted the way you'd read any dictated draft. Every recording and transcript is saved, so a take that goes wrong can be fixed or run again.

• Your words, labeled. The model decides which of your sentences is action and which is dialogue. It isn't asked to rewrite them. When a take drops or changes words, Writers Block pastes it anyway and tells you which words to check.
• Talk the way you think. "Scratch that", "no wait" and corrections partway through a sentence are handled. So is a heading you say in the middle of a sentence, like "she walks in, interior kitchen, night".
• Nothing is uploaded. Parakeet transcribes your recording and a writing model running in Ollama formats it, both on your Mac. On first launch, Writers Block walks you through installing Ollama and downloading the two models, about 6 GB in all.
• Other writing apps too. In the Writers Block workspace you can record or paste a transcript, check the scene, then copy it, send it to any open app, or export Fountain, FDX or plain text.
• Use the dictation app you have. If you already dictate with another app, paste its text into the workspace and Writers Block formats it the same way.